


Know the Wonder

by mooniemurphy



Category: Spring Awakening - Sheik/Sater
Genre: Canon Deaf Characters, Character Analysis, Deaf West, Drabble, F/M, Fluff, Minor Hanschen Rilow/Ernst Robel, Modern Setting, trans Ernst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-17 18:50:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13083126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mooniemurphy/pseuds/mooniemurphy
Summary: Ilse Neumann is a walking natural disaster waiting to happen.





	Know the Wonder

Ilse Neumann is a walking natural disaster waiting to happen.

Ilse is a wildfire. She burns hot and bright and dangerous. She offers warmth and heat and light to all, but she'll burn if you dare to touch, to get to close. She's damaged, and she damages, but she's so bright that she doesn't often see the damage that she can cause. 

Ilse lives in an apartment with Anna and Martha and Wendla, because she can't live alone, or she'll self-destruct. She has a loft bedroom, and she's painted every single wall. The ceiling is painted a deep blue, and she has glow-in-the dark stars stuck all over it, in shapes of constellations. Anna and Martha replace them when they dull, because everyone knows Ilse will forget to. 

Ilse has two fish and a cat that she didn't consult anyone about getting, and all three are named after flowers. The fish are Marigold and Daffodil, but she doesn't know which one is which, and even though they're both named after yellow flowers, they're both blue-grey guppies. The cat has been Dahlia, Freesia, and Iris in the four months that Ilse has had him, and her roommates all know that he's a boy.

Ilse loves flowers. She thinks yellow is an ugly color, but sunflowers make her happy, and she always has a couple in vases around her room. She prefers being outside. She doesn't own any clothes that aren't ripped somehow, from tears in her jeans to runs in her tights to tattered ends of her dresses. When she wears dresses, she also wears Converse. She prefers being barefoot. 

Ilse cut all of her hair off once, but she's let it grow back since then and prefers to wear it in a braid or in buns on either side of her head. She has the words "Blue Wind" tattooed on the back of her neck. She only likes the color pink if she can dye her hair that color, but she won't wear it any other time.

Ilse Neumann is a passionately loyal friend, and she's an only child, but Hanschen is her brother, and so, by default, she claims Thea and Melitta as her sisters. She's fought with Hanschen once, and once only, when he first started dating Ernst, going so far as to threatening to castrate him if he ever hurt Ernst. She punched Melchior Gabor in the face when he almost got Wendla pregnant.

Ilse identifies as genderfluid and bisexual. She went with Ernst to get his binder when he came out as transgender, and she, Hanschen, Anna, Wendla, and Georg have started the Bisexual Bitches club. (Everyone in their friend group is unofficially part of it, even if they aren't bisexual.)

Ilse only drinks if it's tequila, and she smokes weed, and she never had any patience for cigarettes. She's a pirate every year for Halloween. she tried to teach herself sign language when she was six and had just met Mortiz, Wendla, and Thea. She failed to teach herself and learned from Melchior and Hanschen instead. 

She hates Melchior Gabor with a burning passion, and he's also her best friend. Melchior and Ilse consistently try to out-loud each other. Ilse always wins, or so Moritz is told, but he doesn't know.

All that stuff is stuff anyone who knows Ilse knows, but there's the stuff that only Moritz knows, too. 

Ilse doesn't sleep solidly at night. Nightmares wake her up. Sometimes she paints with her fingers in the middle of the night, getting paint all over Moritz's hoodies. Sometimes he wakes up and watches her. Sometimes she likes to paint him.

She likes to dance barefoot in the snow in a dress that barely reaches her knees, without a coat. She does it at least once every winter, and always gets sick, but it doesn't stop her from doing it again. She takes long walks in the moonlight. Sometimes, she prays, but she doesn't believe in God. She has a tattoo of a foxglove flower on her right hip, and Mortiz only knows the flower because she told him once.

Ilse Neumann thinks marriage is stupid. She doesn't like the thought of monogamy and thinks it's unrealistic, but she's faithful to Moritz.

Moritz knows people think he's crazy for dating Ilse Neumann. She's wild and dangerous and carefree and broken. He's broken. They're different as much as they're the same, youth cut short and hope and lack of hope and brokenness. She's more broken than he is. He's less stable than she is. They come together and clash and melt and fall and love. It's messy and hard and beautiful, and Moritz can't fix broken.

Ilse doesn't want him to fix broken.

Once, when Moritz was nine, he had an image of Ilse Stiefel, a long away illusion of a hope that would never, ever happen.

Ilse plays music loudly at three am because she doesn't have to be afraid of waking Moritz up, and he lives alone and doesn't have neighbors. She dances around the apartment in his hoodie and a pair of boyshorts, because they're the only underwear she'll wear. Sometimes she disappears for a day but she always comes back. He's the only person whose ever woken up to find she didn't leave in the middle of the night.

Mortiz is twenty-six and has an image of Ilse Stiefel, a long away illusion of hope that could maybe, someday, happen, if she keeps looking at him like he's the only person in the world that matters.

Ilse Nuemann is a walking natural disaster waiting to happen, but when they've been dating for sixteen months and she lets go of his hand, strips out of her dress down to her bra and boyshorts, and runs to dive headfirst into a river in weather that's barely reaching sixty degrees, Mortiz can't remember a time that he's ever been happier.


End file.
